UNL ORCA Interview Series
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Date of this Version
10-9-2025
Document Type
Article
Citation
Transcript of interview, October 9, 2025
Abstract
Emeritus Professor Donald Paul Weeks was awarded the ORCA in 2014, a year before he retired. He grew up in a small farm south of Terre Haute, Indiana. In his youth, he participated in 4-H programs that must have sparked an interest in science because he earned his bachelor's degree from Purdue University in 1963. Purdue is about 90 miles north of Terre Haute. Don's doctoral work was at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana for a project about protein synthesis during maize germination. Next, he did postdoctoral work at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where his research concerned the mechanisms by which protein synthesis is regulated in eukaryotic cells. After the postdoc ended, he remained at Fox Chase as a researcher from 1970 to 1981. From there, he moved across the country to Sandoz Agro Research Institute in the Stanford University Industrial Park in Palo Alto. He was a principal scientist at Sandoz for 7 years, where he worked on plant molecular biology. In 1989, he joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as the first director of the Center for Biotechnology. His research and tenure home was in the biochemistry department.
Comments
Copyright 2025, Mark Griep. Used by permission.